This Day in Religious History (Riots Drive Pope Pius IX From Rome)

November 24, 1848—Toward the end of a year of revolution, nationalist sentiment, riots and assassinations, Pope Pius IX was forced to flee in disguise from Quirinal Palace, the longtime papal summer residence, to Gaeta, a city in central Italy, where he would remain, along with several cardinals, for nearly a year. The experience so embittered the pope—who had enjoyed a reputation as a reformer upon his elevation to the papacy—that he became the most reactionary pope of modern times for the rest of his 31-year reign, the longest of any pontiff.

Cardinal Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti assumed the tiara in 1846 as the best hope of modernizing and liberalizing the Vatican in at least a generation. He possessed connections to Italian liberals; believed strongly in missions to Latin America because of his own service there as a young priest stationed in Chile; and, at 54, possessed an energy, friendliness, sense of humor, and relative youth that would not be seen in the heir of St. Peter until Pope John Paul II.

And if that wasn’t enough to convince an increasingly restless Italian population, there was this: a dove had even sat on the roof of his carriage as it neared Rome. If that didn’t indicate he was blessed by the Holy Spirit, many of the most devout of his time felt, then what did?

The expectations surrounding Pius were staggering. Unfortunately, they were soon outweighed by the challenges facing him.

Pius’ long reign was shaped indelibly by the events of 1848. I’ve long wanted to write a post on an event in Europe in this tumultuous year. For readers who want a sense of what it was like to live then, think of 1989, when Communism fell all over Eastern Europe and even the Communist government of China appeared on the brink of collapse.

The “Springtime of Nations,” they called it. Wherever you turned in Europe, nationalist and democratic forces were rising against governments suffering from arteriosclerosis as the post-Napoleonic order established at the Congress of Vienna began to come apart: Germany, Poland, Austria, France, and Italy. (Even in Ireland, where people were still coping with the aftereffects of the Potato Famine, a revolt planned by the “Young Ireland” group was planned but quickly failed.)

Revolution was coming to Italy, too. Milan and Venice were revolting against their Austrian rulers; Naples, Tuscany and Piedmont imposed constitutional constraints on their sovereigns. The Papal States were broiling over with their own ferment, partly because Pius’ predecessor, Gregory XVI, and the ultramontane faction within the Vatican had been so insistent on the need of the Pope to be a temporal ruler.

Within a year and a half after taking over, Pius signaled that things would change under him, with such measures as:

* A general amnesty for all political exiles and prisoners;
* An advisory council consisting overwhelmingly of laymen, presided over by a cardinal;
* A Roman Civic Guard; and
* A Cabinet Council.

But Pius began to get cold feet not long after these acts, and he grew even more cautious when faced with calls for his blessings on plans to expel Austria by force.

Of all the ironies of this whole year, this might have been the greatest. At the time of his election by the College of Cardinals, Pius was considered so hostile to Austrian interests that there was a real question whether a voting bloc would prevent a favorable vote for him.

But Pius could not abide a war waged against another Catholic country. Nor did he want any part of a federal Italy led by a pope, telling Italians to be faithful to the princes who then ruled the land. When he finally made that position unequivocally clear, chaos ensued:

* Two of Pius’ chief ministers resigned, exhausted from trying to tamp down anti-coup sentiment;
* A third chief minister, the layman Pellegrino Rossi, was stabbed to death as he arrived to open the new parliament;
* The radicals presented Pius with a list of demands he rejected out of hand, including the abolition of all papal temporal power;
* The following day, Pius—transformed almost overnight from an object of near-veneration to one of hatred—was besieged in the Quirinal by an armed mob, which shot Monsignor Palma, the secretary for Latin letters, as he stood in a window.

Nine days ensued in which the Pope, watched over by the Civic Guard, sweated out what to do. Finally, he made it out with the help of two diplomats: the Bavarian Minister, Count Spaur, and the Ambassador of France, the Duc d’Harcourt.

The account of the escape offered by Nicholas Cheetham in Keepers of the Keys certainly has its comic-opera elements. The way the envoys effected the escape was ingenious: Harcourt paid a formal call on the pope. It seemed to be going on for an awfully long time. But what was really happening was this: the diplomat was reading aloud passages from a newspaper—the same kind of time-wasting trick that U.S. Senators possessed of iron lungs and kidneys perform when they decide to mount a filibuster.

Meanwhile, the pope’s valet was frantically helping his boss into an ordinary priest’s dress. When that process was completed, the two slipped down a back passage into the courtyard, then into a waiting carriage, and finally to an arranged meeting with Spaur. Then they made it into a larger vehicle before reaching Gaeta in the Neapolitan region. It would take another nearly another two years before Pius, with the help of French and Austrian troops, re-entered Rome.

But it was the beginning of the end of the longtime temporal power of the pope, and the increasingly secular trend of one of the prime forces behind Italian nationalism, Count Cavour, only further hardened Pius’ opposition to the new order in Italy and Europe as a whole.

Eamon Duffy paints a tragic picture of the pontiff in Saints and Sinners, noting the anomaly of a man who, though possessed of undeniable personal friendliness, wit and warm, became increasingly tied to intolerant forces that insisted on papal supremacy. Two of his acts were particularly egregious in later years: his 1864 Syllabus of Errors, in which he flatly denied the chance that any pope could “reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and recent civilization”, and the proclamation of papal infallibility when speaking ex cathedra as visible head of all Christians.

The statements provided years of talking points to anti-Catholic bigots in America and Britain. It would take a century for the damage to begin to be undone with the Second Vatican Council—and in certain ways that work is still incomplete.